Main Engine Cut Off - T+308: Chatting with Casey Handmer

Episode Date: August 27, 2025

Casey Handmer, Founder of Terraform Industries, joins me to talk about the state of NASA in 2025, talent acquisition and retention, productivity, and so much more.This episode of Main Engine Cut Off is brought to you by 34 executive producers—Kris, Joakim (Jo-Kim), Creative Taxi, Heiko, Joel, Frank, Josh from Impulse, The Astrogators at SEE, David, Jan, Tim Dodd (the Everyday Astronaut!), Theo and Violet, Joonas, Stealth Julian, Donald, Warren, Matt, Pat, Steve, Fred, Bob, Lee, Natasha Tsakos (pronounced Tszakos), Will and Lars from Agile, Russell, Better Every Day Studios, Ryan, and four anonymous—and hundreds of supporters.TopicsCasey Handmer (@CJHandmer) / XCasey HandmerTerraform IndustriesNASA Is Worth Saving – Casey Handmer's blogEpisode 170 - Luckily, We Did All the Math (with Casey Handmer) - Off-NominalThe science behind clean hydrocarbons | The Freethink Interview - YouTubeThe ShowLike the show? Support the show on Patreon or Substack!Email your thoughts, comments, and questions to [e-mail] @WeHaveMECOFollow @[e-mail] on MastodonListen to MECO HeadlinesListen to Off-NominalJoin the Off-Nominal DiscordSubscribe on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Pocket Casts, Spotify, Google Play, Stitcher, TuneIn or elsewhereSubscribe to the Main Engine Cut Off NewsletterArtwork photo by NASAWork with me and my design and development agency: Pine Works

Hello and welcome the main engine cutoff. I am Anthony Galangelo, and today we've got Casey Hanmer with us to kind of just chat, to be honest. I asked him to come on to talk about what's been going on at NASA lately, especially with regards to, you know, losing a quarter of the people that work there. some of the problems that are facing them from a budgetary perspective, a program planning perspective. He's got really interesting insights. He's the founder of Terraform Industries. He's worked at JPL in the past. He has really good insight on, you know, what is actually, you know, from his opinion and perspective, ailing NASA and some of that guided from stories that he has from when he worked internally at JPL.

So I find that his opinion and his insights is something you don't hear a lot of other places. There's, you know, critiques, criticism, ideas that he's got that he puts out there. He writes a lot that you don't really find elsewhere, at least talked about in loud volumes elsewhere. So, always appreciate his insight, and I'm excited to have him on Miko finally. We've done an off-nominal with him in the past, which is also worth a listen, but have not yet had him over here, and I'm sure he'll be back. So let's give Casey call. But actually, first, before we do that, let me say thank you to everyone who supports Managing Codolph. over at Managing Cutoff.com slash support.

There are nearly 900 of you over there supporting every single month. I'm so thankful for your support. This show was produced by 34 executive producers. Thank you to Chris, Joe Kim, Creative Taxi, Hico, Joel, Frank, Josh from Impulse, The Astrogators at SE, David, David, John, Tim Dodd, David Ashnot, Theo and Violet, Eunice, Stealth Julian, Donald, Warren, Matt, Pat, Steve, Fred, Bob Lee, Natasha Saccoas, Will and Lars from Agile,

Russell, Better Everyday Studios, Ryan, and four anonymous executive producers. thank you all so much for the support and for making this episode possible if you want to join the crew Managing Cutoff.com slash support to 100% listener supported so jump in there

if you like what's going on here and without further ado now let's give Casey a call. Casey, welcome to Miko. I'm glad that you said yes to joining me and not knowing which podcast this was but nonetheless this will be a good time. Yeah, I mean, always happy to help.

You were on Off Nominal I don't know how long ago it was a couple months ago. and we got talking about the way that that kind of you interacted when you're inside NASA and the way that you bumped up against some of the edges and your opinions on how things should go within an organization and then a lot of drama has happened between then and now you know a quarter of the people at NASA have left at this point or are in the process of leaving over the next few months I know there's some that that linger on through like

February or something like that but it's been a really really turbulent time. We've got, you know, NASA administrator coming and going or nominee coming and going. We've got an interim administrator now. Very chaotic. And I just thought you're the person that has an interesting view on how we could do this sort of thing better, probably. And that means both how NASA can work better itself, which we've offered a lot of opinions on over the years. But also, I think the way that you could have, if you were given the task of doing what NASA has had happened to it over the last year, like how would we go about that? And then, orderly fashion and is it the right idea? What are the vibes? That's sort of the framework that

I want to work within. Sure. So maybe to kind of just check ourselves, like, where are you at on, you know, you haven't worked at NASA for a little while now. You're on your own thing, Terraform, which we should talk about at some point as well. How did you see this couple, past couple months going, you know, from the outside, maybe still got friends there. What's your, what's your sense of it? Yeah. Well, to summarize, not great. But of course, I need to get the obligatory throat clearing out of the way.

I don't work at NASA. I haven't worked at NASA for almost four years. I don't represent NASA. I'm representing only my own lousy opinions here. And I don't have any relevant inside information that I would share with you anyway. So it's just to kind of make that clear. But like, this is standard fair on the blog as well. So if you're familiar with my blogs, you'll see that.

mostly just, you know, exquisitely refined posting happening here. We're in a bit of a pickle, aren't we, on the spacefront? Yeah. To put it lightly. Yeah. It's not great. Just to kind of underscore this, China successfully did a hotfire test of their long march 10 moon rocket, which they call a moon rocket.

It's for their manned moon exploration. program. They have publicly stated they intend to land humans on the moon before 2030. I picked December 5th, which I think is as an annual national day or something. That's 1,570-odd days from today. It sounds like a long time. It's not that long, especially in the context of the current structure of NASA, which very rarely delivers missions anything like on time or budget. But there's no doubt in my mind that United States has the knowledge, the resources, the skills, the people, you know, the history and so on to, should they so desire, go and put a substantial base on the moon.

But unfortunately, NASA, which is kind of in this awkward position of being the agency whose job that would be to execute is in no position to do that. And, you know, you can get 10 or 15 different games. guests on here and you absolutely should and I love them all. And they'll say, well, it's Congress's fault or it's, you know, Bill Nelson's fault or it's, you know, whoever else's fault. I think that Americans love pointing the finger. But the question that I'm most interested in is how do we turn this around, right? If I put on my turnaround CEO hat, how do we actually transform the NASA that we have and the Congress that we have and the space industry that we have into

the fighting force that can prove that it is, in fact, the organization or the set of organizations that we desperately need to do what they're here to do. I mean, NASA was formed in 1958 in response to Sputnik. It was like, oh, hell no, communists are not going to own the sky. And we're in the same situation right now, which is that China, who have made no secret of their extraterritorial ambitions here on Earth have made no secret of their ambitions in space since, you know, I visited the National Space Museum in China in 2006, and I was like, oh, yeah, they seem serious about it. Are they going to go and land on the moon?

And they're going to stick their flag on the good spot down on shackled and the crater, and they're going to say, this is ours now, and the moon is red. And we're kind of kind of overlook the relevant parts of the outer space treaty and say that, you're welcome to use the moon, but nothing within 100 miles are here. Thank you very much. and maybe the United States can settle for sad and sorry seconds up on the North Pole where maybe they can find a peak of nearly eternal light or something. But it's just not a future that I like.

And, you know, United States has many problems, of course, but I think that, you know, the way the United States has run its part of the space program has been one which has been pretty inclusive overall. It's been one where other nations with and without their own space programs have been able to contribute astronauts and instruments and satellites and satellites and scientists to participate. And I think it's, you know, the Chinese space program, you know, by law has been shut out of participation in bilateral stuff with NASA. But I have no doubt whatsoever that the engineers and the scientists who work in the Chinese space program don't see it

that differently to the way that I do. But their leadership is, you know, there's no two ways about it. It's an autocratic dictatorship, right, with nuclear weapons. And I have young children. In fact, my son just turned seven today, so happy birthday. And I think, like, you know, when we tried to watch the starship launch yesterday, am I, am I, like, lying to him when I say that, you know, the future of humanity is in space among the stars, and it's for all of humanity, not just the Chinese humanity who don't believe in political freedom? And, like, NASA spends $20 billion a year, which is the equivalent of two Manhattan projects side by side. And its only mission is to be like, okay, like, in this.

the intersection of where space and freedom lies, like make sure that the United States will always win, no questions asked. And right now, a gun to all our heads, there's just no way in hell that NASA can have boots on the moon before China does, unless extremely drastic actions are taken to direct more effort and attention in that direction. So is that your particular, like, that's the direction you point NASA wholeheartedly? is focused on lunar research, right? Because this is also larger... I mean, I'm a Mars guy as well.

Well, that's the other aspect, right? Yeah, yeah. You shacked up at JPL for all those years. So yeah. But there's... Yeah, I mean, like, so it's actually an important question, which is, and something that Jared Eisenman has talked a bit about as well, which is that NASA does a lot of different things, right?

And NASA has this incredible science program, and in some ways it's the part of NASA that works the best. And they've got the Cato surveys, and they've got James Space Telescope, and the Mars Exploration Program, and some really good examples there, I think, of, like, maybe 1960s or 1970s era, like, productivity and spirit still persisting to this day. But at the same time, let's not full ourselves. NASA exists for an important strategic purpose, the same reason that the NSF runs the Antarctic program.

And it just so happens the day-to-day operations of NASA are preoccupied to science, and the day-to-day operations of the National Science Foundation in Antarctica are occupied with science. That's really only because scientists will voluntarily go to Antarctica, right? It doesn't make any sense to staff the South Pole station with soldiers who don't want to be there, right, when scientists will volunteer to go. And the same way, like, NASA exists strategically to make sure that United States has a standing army of extremely smart people who kind of straddle the military civilian world, who are world experts at getting, you know, let's say kinetic objects at high speed from point A to point B in a hurry. Because if you need that expertise in technology in a hurry, you can't just wish it into existence. It takes years to develop, years to maintain. And actually, it's kind of one of the main things that I'm most worried about in NASA's case,

which is that it has become abundantly clear that for a variety of extremely complex reasons, there's no simple solutions here. NASA has lost the ability to do anything quickly. And so its key strategic purpose, actually, is being undermined by the inability or unwillingness of Congress to enforce anything like sensible levels of productivity out of that organization. The kind of productivity is an interesting question because, you know, I don't know if you've read all of the Augustine reports. And there was one fairly recently, actually, about like SLS and the moon and stuff.

And you can control F in that. You don't have to read the whole thing. Productivity is not mentioned a single time in any of them. Right. Now, that's kind of a question. It's an important question. Like, why is it that the question is always like, do we want to spend more money or less money, or do we want to go to the moon or Mars, or do we want to do science programs or not?

I never like, okay, well, we have a standing army of 20,000 really smart people with good resources and fabulous equipment and so on. Why can't they produce 20% more stuff, you know, over the course of the next five years, as opposed to 20% less stuff over time, which is kind of the trend. It's kind of strange because in the private economy over time, generally, businesses become more productive. They have to or they get out competed.

But there's just no question. I don't think anyone serious would disagree that NASA's ability to build ship and fly missions has degraded over time. One thing I want to dig into on that specifically is I've talked a lot recently about the fact that some of the most or some, at least, if you want to be generous,

some of the cancellations that we're seeing right now is my opinion that those would have happened anyway because in the last 10 years, NASA has been sloppily avoiding the fact that all these budget wedges were going to shoot up at the same time, right? We've got the last days of the ISS, the replacement of the ISS, SLS, the landers, the space suits. All of those are spiking at the same moment.

And in many of those cases, they're kind of not really all into it, right? commercial Leo, let's replace the ISS with commercial space agents, they have sent piddling amounts compared to what we would need to actually develop those. But yet talked about it in a way that this was a full-blown program that would be ready to take over from the ISS. At some point in 2028, 2030, whatever it was. And so where it was clear to me that these are going to be battles that were going to have to fight, the system at large, because I want to ask like top down, bottom up where you sit on this, was avoiding answering that question up until the moment when

somebody did it for them. And same goes with Mars sample return. I think the question was answered a long time ago. I mean, like, Axiom made a bet that NASA would, like, back up a massive truck full of money to them if they built, you know, a good enough plywood copy. And Mike Sofrieney was extremely well connected and so on. And they didn't, it didn't happen. I sympathize with that because I run a startup and I'm also making a bet about, you know, a state of the future that we cannot know until we get there. And meanwhile, I think Vast set out with a slightly different mission, which was not like, let's see if we can privatize this aspect of NASA's operations, but let's see if we can build

a space station that operates on a different model and a much cheaper model and see if that's something that we can sell to NASA and also to the private sector, because it's just abundantly clear to me from the various failures of CASIS, for example, that, like, there isn't a single Fortune 500 company that's going to front up and purchase, like, lab space in the ISS for $5 million a day. But at $50,000 a day, that's comparable to, like, you know, a top research synchrotron or, like, maybe a research in Antarctica or something. That is the sort of thing that you could address with, you know, not top line grants or, like, large businesses that need to do critical research in space. But you don't know.

Like, in some ways, like, Jed is off spending billions of his own dollars on VAST just to get a single data point, which is, like, what is the demand elasticity of lab space and space. Lab space and space, that's a funny word. you know, bench space on a space station. But I think the model that he's pursuing there makes a lot of sense, which is, you know, if you think about what we're actually spending our time doing on the space station, it's mostly maintaining unmaintainable systems and, like, moving consignments of food and water from one place to another. And that seems like an astonishingly inefficient thing to do with people whose time

is literally costing like tens of thousands of dollars per minute. And maybe it makes more sense to launch space stations, like manufacture them serially, so it's cheaper to make them because you're making them over and over again. and launch them fully stocked with everything they need, including all the equipment that a particular customer or client might need, and you can always offer customizations for additional prices on top of that, fly people up in a dragon, you know, a couple of rotations, perhaps. And then when it's run out of stuff, it's actually not all that intrinsically valuable.

It's an aluminum shell, you know, floating around the earth. It's out of propellant. It's out of food. It's out of water. It's out of oxygen. Like, why is that more intrinsically valuable? If you have to replenish it with 60% of its mass anyway and launch is not that expensive anymore,

why not just launch a whole new space station and take the old one and splash it? Or, I don't know, maybe some person would be like, oh, I'm going to make a business and like... Yeah, harvest and together a bunch of empty pieces and growing mushrooms in them or something. I don't know. Yeah, totally.

But the point is, like, it's scrap at that point. It's salvage value. It's a decision at that point. At least you're at a decision point versus an unsustainable approach. But that's... Whereas with the space station, it took like 25 years to give me it to the point

where you could even do experiments in it. I mean, it's 25 years to assemble the damn thing. Like, that's a... astonishingly slow, even by the standards of NASA. And then we've got a couple years where we have, you know, crew rotations with four people and now we're like, maybe we're going to drop to three people or go every eight months. That's a hostage puppy, right?

That's just like pony up some money, please. Right, that's when people... But for this kind of program, right, is the way that I'm looking at the, what I just said with, like, the cancellations because of all these budget spikes happening, that smacks of a lot of like upper level dysfunction in terms of what is being stacked on top of NASA's workload and, and, and, and, dictating what programs they need to take on. But do you also, I guess, which do you feel like is the more stressful force? Is it, is it that being given too many to-dos? Or is it at a lower

level that these programs individually and the productivity within is actually something that, you know, could save the day? If that got revolutionized, that they would be able to handle all those different projects side by side. Well, that's a good question. So you say, well, does NASA have the funding to do mass sample return and, you know, ISS follow on? And, you know, actually make Artemis work properly, new spaces, and landers and so on, or within their own organizations or with the existing workforce, and all according to the side deck that someone put together a few years ago. The answer is no, absolutely not.

There's just no way that can possibly occur. Essentially, like, you know, where is the anomaly in the matrix? Like, where are the things where, like, over time, you know, things are getting better and costing less money, right? Like, very unusual things. We've seen that historically, you know, in the wider industry in computers, for example. And right now in space, it's like basically 90% of it is downstream of SpaceX. And so, like, that's just a wave that NASA is going to have to ride one way or the other.

And I know that there are some NASA centers that are, you know, pretty pro-kill about it and they don't like SpaceX all that much. But at the end of the day, we're all here on Team Space. We're here to do important things in space. And I think a much better question to ask might be like, well, you know, Elon obviously works really hard, but he's a human, the same as the rest of us. So, like, why is it that his organization with fewer resources is able to launch literally hundreds of times more rockets than other organizations, private or public, U.S. or foreign, with more resources? It's like, it's not like one or two more rockets. It's like hundreds of more rockets. The first Starship test launch occurred, like, in the first half of all of SpaceX's launches.

They've done, I don't know, 500 launches or something at this point in total. and then there's like the high one 80s, 190s or something with the first starship launch. There's this great chart that did the rounds a couple of days ago. It's the important question, right? And it's not like the SpaceX employees are like 100 times smarter, right? Some of them are smarter. Some of them are probably not a smart.

It's not like they're paid 100 times more. They're probably paid less on average than NASA employees. Right. And many have now went off to found competitors or new, you know, things that might actually rival SpaceX or is at least aiming in that direction. but those have been either they're still kind of waiting to see what's going to happen with them or they're slow out of the gate. Well, this is the question that I have to ask, which is like Elon has probably generated

a million articles in the mainstream press in the last five years, right? How many of the articles say, well, let's do a real deep dive into what he's doing differently. This could be interesting, right? Or how the organization as a whole is not in the Elon, obviously, Gwyn and tens of thousands of other people are working really hard there. But somehow, they're making this work. And it's not a miracle, right? You could just say, like, why don't we run NASA Center as?

a bit more like this. And I think it's actually relatively straightforward. Like it's not even, it's not even all that mysterious. It's like, well, you need to collocate responsibility and authority, right? And you need to put in place like powerful program managers who have funding authority and you need to fire them when they fail. Right. So, so you've got, I don't know, let's say NASA employees on the order of 20,000 people, probably got like a thousand people who'd express interest in running big program and maybe 300 of them would be not obviously terrible choices. But there's only like half a dozen or a dozen really big programs. So like, let's have some, you know, metaphorically bloody wars and quick promotions and see who, you know, under

the age of 50, perhaps, because we already, you know, like, it's pretty much shaken out above that age, I think, at this point, has that potential. This is one of the great things that I get to do in my own startup, which they get to hire these really ambitious smart kids pretty much straight out of school and say, how much can you take? And then they get to find out. We all got to find out. And it turns out that a lot of them are ready to step into the sort of roles that our society wouldn't normally give people until they're in that 30s, early 40s, and they're 22, 23, it's not an anomaly. The Apollo program was pretty much the same way, right? It just turns out if people are ready to do that kind of work, you have to let them. This is actually

one of my personal frustrations, of course, is a personal issue, but when I was at JPL, I met hundreds and hundreds of people, and many of them, you know, most of them are super smart and very excited about space, obviously, and many of them taking pay cuts to work there, and how many of them still work there now. Almost none, right? Because at the end of the day, you want to be able to live in a house and afford to run a car and have children. And if JPL will only pay you $90,000 a year and no stock to work on a program where, like, you get politely but firmly refused from working on the cool stuff you want to work on until you're, you know, plenty of gray hairs, sooner or later you pick up the phone when Apple calls and offers you half a million dollars in

stock to go and work on their latest and greatest device that next year will be in the hands of a million people. And it's just, it's very unreasonable for us to expect that, like, NASA should be, in its current configuration, should be, like, the place of choice for young, ambitious people to go and work on space. Like, it's probably, like, in the top 10, you know, in the English-speaking world, but it's not number one. And what would it take for it to be number one? It needs to be a place where you can go and actually, like, challenge yourself and succeed. I mean, I've got a fairly long blog post that talks at some length about, about how to improve the talent retention and kind of optimization function across NASA.

But this is actually a problem that we've seen across all of government. It's a real challenge to attract and retain really, really good people. And the problem is that essentially we get bottlenecked by these really tough problems that actually do need really extraordinary people to go and solve them. It's interesting, too, because even examples of what you would point to internally at SpaceX as like the things that are done that make it an efficient place because any

article that was written in your your vein of was, is just like... Maybe not absolutely efficient. Spacex is also, you know, catastrophe in its own way. Yeah. But any article that was written to address the thing that you're floating typically results in crazy work hours, overworked people,

burnout, this side of the other thing, right? Which is absolutely true because I know a bunch of people that were in that situation at SpaceX and have left. But there's also another subset of people that have been there. There are people that are quoted heavily in Eric Berger's first book about Falcon 1 that still work at SpaceX today. Yep. And by all measures are not burn out or feeling it or whatever. So maybe they were burned out on day one. I don't know. It's like, oh, people work too hard they burn out. That's not true, right? Like if you want to get stronger, you go to the

gym, right? Does going to the gym and lifting heavy weights make you weaker? No, it makes you stronger. Right. And it's the same thing that like if you've got good people, you give them responsibility, authority and, you know, measurable challenges that they can actually contribute towards. And like everything that NASA is doing is out of distribution, right? It's like, we don't know if this is possible. Please try and make it work. And actually really good people rise up to those challenges. And the thing is, plenty of people go to SpaceX and it's like SpaceX University. And they don't expect to spend their whole careers there. They go there for two or three years and they learn from the best, how to be the best. And then they take those skills into other

companies and other organizations. And they've leveled up. You know, like you've only got 40 or so years of productive time in the workforce, and do you really want to spend 20 of those years learning what you could learn in two years if you went to SpaceX? No, obviously not. You know, people have been asking me for years. I got into grad school and I got to SpaceX, what should I do? And I said, well, the psychic damage is the same, but the pay is better at SpaceX. It's not like working for some like cushy, like phone it in, mostly remote email job somehow makes you better and like happier and stuff like that. I don't think it does. You know, I've never been more miserable in my entire life than when I was at SpaceX. Sorry, when I was at JPL.

and trying to square the circle of like, well, I finally got what I wanted. I'm the dog that caught the car. I managed to get a green card. I managed to get a job at JPL working with all these people who are working on. I worked on the curiosity mission for a bit. You know, what a dream, right? And yet at the same time, I find it intensely frustrating because, and again, like, this is, you know, it's uncooperatable, but I was called into my managers, managers,

office on more than one occasion and personally told that, like, we're going to, you know, like it'll be reflected in your performance review that your performance was too good on this program and that, you know, there's a six-month, you know, funding, you know, account for this work. And you were told there's a six-month account for this work. And you went and solved the problem in three days. It doesn't help anyone. It doesn't make you look smart. It just shows that you can't work as part of a team, right? It's not your money. It's not your mission. I'm like, well, it is my money. My tax is paid for it. And they're like, don't be a smart ass. Just do as you told. I'm like, at that point, I was like,

okay, well, so I took a huge pay cut to come and work here, but I'm also getting punished for like finding some way, like, because of my weird proclivity's interests and like little slice of skills to take a problem that they thought would take six months and solve it in three days, right? And I'm like, obviously I can't do that with every problem under the sun, but like if you get 10 people who can do that with 10 different problems, like, I'll give you a concrete example. This one comes up, comes to mind because of, because of, you know, the scrub yesterday with the weather thing, right? one of the best ways of finding out what's going on in the upper atmosphere is to shine

radar through it, radio messages through it, radio waves through it. And this is a method that's called atmospheric occultation. So you can do this with, say, GNSS satellites. So you can put a GNS receiver in orbit, and you can receive signals from other GNSS satellites, and they can pass through the atmosphere, they can bounce off the surface of the Earth, and you can determine things like atmospheric moisture and temperature. And that, you don't have to launch a weather balloon. You can find out this information. You can feed any two weather models. And I worked as part of a group that was a part of a section that was working on that at JPL. And they had a plan to launch one, then two, then five, and then maybe in 2035,

they could launch a constellation of satellites that would track, you know, on the order of 100 signals simultaneously from all the different GNSS satellites from all the different countries. And this would increase the amount of data we had for weather prediction and climate understanding by some fraction. And that was kind of our internal decadal survey supporting a group, probably about 30% overall of the work of a group of a few hundred people, right? And I have people, I have friends who work at Starlink, have taken interest in that in that program for years.

And I also understand how medical MRI works and CT scanning works. And I was like, hmm, well, you know, the Starlink constellation operates on 10 discrete frequencies, and there are millions of ground stations and thousands approaching tens of thousands of satellites. And they are collecting link budget information every second that they're, you know, in range. So we're literally collecting hundreds of millions of billions of signals per day of of atmospheric capacity information that's frequency-specific.

And you can actually take that data and you can invert it using tomography to develop a high-resolution three-dimensional map of the entire atmosphere via with moisture and with temperature. And you can feed that into your NOAA models or whatever you need for the prediction.

And that would literally, at our pre-Stylink rate of like, say, upper atmosphere information collection improvement rate, we would get there in like the 2050s. But, like, we could literally just knock on the door of SpaceX and say, hey, like, we're trying to solve weather prediction for, like, you know, human safety purposes, et cetera, et cetera. Would you mind never so much if we had access to that data?

Here's an API. And we basically got to the point where they said, yeah, here's an API, go for it. And I personally ran a bunch of mathematical calculations showing that this was possible with, you know, a day's worth of data. And then I was asked to hand that off to, you know, our sections, you know, industry liaison person, a whole person, you know, whose whole job was to make sure this sort of thing happened. and then nothing happened and a couple months later

I got a back channel from someone inside SpaceX saying hey you guys lost interest in this what's going on and I said I'll follow up and I did and I once again got called to my section manager's office and had to sit down

quiet hour performance review saying yeah yeah we can't do this because the funding for our section depends on getting this direct admission in 2035 to fly six or 10 satellites that take this data and I said if the data's already in a database and like

thousands of people's lives depend on accurate weather prediction and this will allow us to, like, move that forward by 10 or 20 years. Do you think that Congress is going to turn around and punish you for solving this problem faster than you expected? Just shows how naive I was. Yeah, maybe they would have. Yeah, absolutely.

This was in 2019, right? This was in 2019. This is before COVID. So six years later, your weather prediction still sucks because of the incentive landscape in organizations like NASA that could literally go and solve that problem tomorrow if they wanted to. And it drove me crazy. So eventually I just had to put in my two-week's notice and start my own company, where at least now, like, problems occur all the time, but they're my dad fault and I can fix it.

So just to give you a taste of it. But that kind of story is exactly why I was like, Casey should come on and talk about this, because we hear the other ones that we can see from the outside a lot, but we don't get a lot of concrete examples of that internally. Here's the last question I'll leave this on. Well, you can understand why people wouldn't advertise this sort of stuff, but I promise this is not unique to me. This is not unique to me.

This happens every single day. And, like, the people who, you know, the people who are happy 20-year veterans at SpaceX have found some way to make that work. And the people who are happy 20-year veterans at NASA have also found some way to, like, get their head around the fact that, like, they and all their friends who have, like, IQs of 150 plus and multiple degrees from MIT, sitting in the equivalent of, like, rocket daycare. And, yeah, a few of them every now and then can do something super cool. But most of the time, everyone involved knows that they're spending 10 times too much time and 10 times too much money, solving problems that were solved a long time ago by someone else, just as well. right here's here's the last riddle productivity let me leave you this riddle okay NASA had a quarter of its people leave

yeah between six months ago and six months from now and their budget was going to be cut accordingly and Congress responded with no let's keep the funding where it is so they are heading into a potential fiscal year where they have as much money as they had last year and a quarter of the three quarters of the amount of people is that a like how how great of a discrepancy would you need to actually flip some of the incentive systems to

lean more in the direction that you're talking about? Is it something that now that they have more resources to less people, they're able to be at least more competitive on salaries and attract right people? Or is it still some more of the kind of control mechanisms that you're talking about? I'm a bit black-pilled about this, but quite literally you could pull more money on it. You can now see a budget of $50 billion a year. And how much faster do you think that'll make SLS turn into a good rocket? If anything, it'll make it. slower, right? How much faster would that get us a lunar lander that like makes Johnson Space Center happy? Probably not at all. Would it, would it magically make spaceuits like be

developed? We already spent a billion dollars in spaces. How many more dollars do we have to spend on space suits? This is not a problem that you can fix by putting more money on. And I suspect that putting more money on will actually, you know, delay the kind of reckoning that is so desperately needed up and down this organization. As for the quarter of people I left, yeah, I mean, I was writing internal memos at JPL in 2019 saying, by the way, like NASA, SpaceX has been reflying boosters multiple times. We have post-launch scarcity. We've got to figure out how to do serial production

of landers and rovers and helicopters and orbitors so that we have missions to every planet at every launch window ready to go, and it's just $100 million launch cost, which is trivial in the grand scheme of things, to make this happen, to make sure that the JPL's expertise remains at the forefront of what is needed

and that we have science coming in, and we can figure out how to run missions with fewer than 50 people, right? And these ideas were, were mostly shut down or ignored. And Laurie Lesson came in and now they've had to lay off over a thousand people, some 200 of which subsequently lost their houses in fires earlier this year. Like just tragedy compounded upon tragedy, competitive for that. Completely avoidable, completely avoidable. Every single one of those people could have kept their job, right?

Every single one of these people would have been thankful for having the opportunity to have their salary increased to be closer to market rate and also being given management that took their skills and their precious time. That's the thing. It's not a money question. it's a talent question. There's plenty of talent in the United States. It's just being wasted, right? It just needs to be used in a way that actually gets us closer to these things. Or China will own the light cone.

China will dominate, and China's political ideas will dominate the future of humanity forever. Okay, this is, it sounds hyperbolic, but like if they land on the moon and say it's ours, and by the way, we have nuclear weapons, what is the United States planning to do about it? Blockade them? Like, I don't think that's going to work very well. So this is like the failure of the kind of, you know, the U.S. model of kind of starting up this space agency and then kind of just leaving it there on the shelf for 60 years and then expecting that it will work properly.

It's just insane to me. Yeah, and part of the problem, of course, is that, is that, you know, when there are downturns and so on at NASA and things are going grim, who do you think leaves? Right? It's the people who are getting the calls from Apple or from Google or whatever, and not the people who really should probably be moved on. And, you know, I hate to say this, but, like, no organization can function if they never fire anyone for cause.

Right. Like, we all know this. It's unpleasant, but some people are just not working out in an organization. And if you have enough of them around, it completely destroys it. Right. And unfortunately, I never knew anyone at NASA who was fired for being unable to do their job. What are the odds? What are the odds that no one at NASA was ever able to not do their job?

Okay. I knew plenty of people who were laid off because they couldn't find work for them because everyone has to be fully employed at all times, even if that means that they're expected to spend six months sitting on an account to do three days of work. And I've known a few people who've been let go because they were found to have volunteered their time illegally on projects. It's called time card fraud. So like, oh, it's my proposal, but I don't have enough money to develop it. So I'll just do it in my nights and weekends. That's against the rules. You can be fired for that.

But I don't know anyone who's ever been fired for, like, incompetence. What are the odds? right and so it's just a very difficult situation all right hit us with a little optimism for two minutes and tell us about terraform because you're working on really cool stuff there was a cool free think video what another like a month or two ago that was a good one yeah yeah so if you go to our website terraform ministries.com there are links to all our back podcasts and and blog posts and so on we're very open about this we're based in burbank california you know we fairly routinely show people around. We are developing the technology that the space community would recognize as the in-situ

resource utilization fuel synthesis stack. So once we go to Mars, we need to make fuel to fly home, make it out of CO2 from the atmosphere and water. It needs a lot of power to do that. And it turns out that there's also a huge need for hydrocarbons here on Earth, obviously, and that we drill them out of the ground, but that's getting more and more difficult over time. It also has certain climate externalities and we can solve those problems by using cheap solar photovolta heat power, another anomaly in the matrix that solar is getting cheaper and cheaper and there's more and more of it to basically do what plants do, but about 100 times more effectively on a per area basis and make all the carbon neutral high quality, high purity, low toxicity hydrocarbons you could

ever possibly want. Yeah, and we're hiring. So check out our job listings and we're looking for cool people who are interested in seeing just how far they can go. perfect place to land it. Casey, thanks for hanging out with me. And it's always, it's always good to chat. We've got to do this more often. Anytime. Thanks again to Casey for coming on the show and sharing his insight and perspective. Always find it interesting to listen to the way that he sees things in this space. So glad to have him on here. Thank you all for listening for the support. As always, as I mentioned up front, manager cutoff.com slash support. Hit me up on email, Anthony at managercutoff.com.

If you've got questions or thoughts, and otherwise, I will talk to you soon. I don't know. Oh, I don't know. No. I don't know.